Massachusetts restaurant wages and pay: minimum wage, paydays and deductions
The pay questions that come up in every Massachusetts restaurant: what the minimum is, when pay is due, what can come out of a paycheck, and which hours have to be paid.
General information about Massachusetts and federal rules, checked against the official sources linked under each answer on September 24, 2026. It is not legal or tax advice.
$15.00 an hour, the rate in force since January 1, 2023. It applies statewide, to full-time and part-time staff alike. Tipped staff can be paid a lower $6.75 service rate only when strict conditions are met.
The service-rate conditions are covered on the tips and service charges page. The 2023 step was the last one in the schedule passed in 2018, so no further increase is written into the law.
No increase has been enacted. None of the nine questions on the November 3, 2026 statewide ballot concerns wages or tips, and the main Senate bill to move the minimum toward $20 (S.1349) was sent to a study order on August 13, 2026.
Voters rejected the 2024 ballot question that would have phased out the tipped service rate, so the $6.75 rate remains. Any future change would need new legislation or a future ballot question.
No. Private restaurants pay the $15.00 statewide minimum wherever they are in Massachusetts. Boston's Living Wage ($19.36 an hour from July 1, 2026) applies only to workers on City of Boston service contracts and subcontracts worth at least $25,000.
Hourly employees must be paid weekly or every two weeks. Pay is due within six days after the pay period ends for someone who worked five or six days that week, and within seven days for someone who worked seven days, or fewer than five.
Final pay has its own, shorter deadlines, covered on the final pay page.
Every paycheck needs a pay slip showing the employer's name, the employee's name, the pay date, the hours worked, the hourly rate, and every deduction or increase for the period. You cannot charge for pay stubs.
Electronic pay stubs are allowed if the employee has a way to print them for free.
You can require direct deposit, but the employee chooses the bank or credit union, and nobody can be charged a fee to get their pay. If you pay by check, you must give staff a way to cash it free of charge.
We found no Massachusetts rule that bans paying wages in cash, but cash pay needs the same pay slip, the same payroll records and the same tax withholding as any other method. Massachusetts has no paycard-specific rule on mass.gov that we could confirm, so the direct-deposit rules above are the safe baseline.
Generally no. The Supreme Judicial Court held in Camara v. Attorney General (2011) that an employer may not deduct from earned wages unless the law allows it or there is a "clear and established debt", and an employer's own finding that an employee was at fault does not qualify, even if the employee agreed.
The Attorney General also says employers cannot pass ordinary business costs such as supplies or tools on to workers. For servers, making them cover a walkout out of their tips would also be a deduction from a tip, which the Tips Act separately prohibits.
Only if the employee chooses to take the meal and actually eats it, after written notice of the plan and the price and the employee's voluntary written acceptance. The maximum charges are $1.50 for breakfast, $2.25 for lunch and $2.25 for dinner.
One meal can be charged for a shift of three or more hours. Two meals can be charged only if the shift fully covers two meal periods or eight hours.
Only if the housing is safe, sanitary and meets the State Sanitary Code, and only with the same written notice and voluntary written acceptance required for meals. The maximum is $35 a week for a single room, $30 a week each for a room shared by two, and $25 a week each for three or more.
Yes. If you require staff to buy or rent a uniform, you reimburse the actual cost, and if it needs dry cleaning or other special care, you reimburse that too. Massachusetts, unlike federal law, does not allow uniform deductions even when pay stays above the minimum wage.
A uniform is special clothing, shoes included, required as a condition of the job, such as matching colors or a logo shirt. A general dress code like "black pants" where staff choose their own clothes is not a uniform. Ordinary wash-and-wear items need no cleaning reimbursement, and a uniform deposit needs permission from the Department of Labor Standards.
If they were scheduled for three or more hours and arrived on time, you owe at least three hours of pay at no less than the $15.00 minimum wage, even if they worked only one. If you agreed in advance that their regular shifts are shorter than three hours, you pay only the hours worked.
The regulation says "no less than the basic minimum wage", so do not assume the $6.75 service rate covers the unworked hours. Charitable organizations recognized by the IRS are exempt from this rule.
Yes, unless the employee does not have to be at work or another set place and is effectively free to use the time as they like. If an off-site on-call employee is called in, every hour they then work is paid.
Yes, when you require them. In Massachusetts, working time includes all time an employee is required to be on the premises or on duty, before or after the shift. Required food-safety or allergen training for your own restaurant is working time.
Under federal rules, a meeting or training is unpaid only if it is outside regular hours, truly voluntary, not directly related to the job, and no productive work is done. Staff called in on a day off for a meeting are paid for the hours worked, and the three-hour reporting rule applies if they were told it would last three hours or more.
Yes, to the nearest five minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter hour, but only if the rounding averages out over time so staff are paid for all the time they actually worked. Rounding that always favors the restaurant is not allowed.
You cannot pay someone less than employees of a different gender who do comparable work, meaning work of substantially similar skill, effort and responsibility under similar conditions, whatever the job titles say. You also cannot ask applicants about their pay history or stop staff from discussing their pay.
Differences are allowed only for seniority, merit, production or sales systems, location, job-related education, training or experience, or required travel. A gap cannot be fixed by lowering anyone's pay. Violations cost the unpaid wages plus an equal amount again, plus attorney's fees.
Your restaurant remains the employer of record and approves payroll and employment decisions. BOHO is not a PEO, a staffing agency, or legal counsel. These answers describe the rules; they don’t decide how they apply to your restaurant. Headcount, entity structure and the exact facts of a shift can change the answer, so confirm anything that affects pay with the agency, an employment attorney or your tax adviser.
